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A heavyweight panel that included Google, Microsoft Open Technologies, and Digital Primates guided Streaming Media West attendees through the creation of an open source DASH-AVC/264 player. Will Law, chief architect for Akamai, moderated and kicked off the discussion.

"We're trying to cook up something delicious here, and we have three ingredients to do it. We've got MPEG-DASH, we've got MSE/EME, and we've got dash.js," Law began. "You may not know what these are. I'm going to describe very briefly what our core ingredients are, and then we'll see how they're mixed by our panelists."

Law first explained MPEG-DASH: "The MPEG-DASH we've heard a fair amount in the show already. There was a session yesterday. It's an ISO-based standard for adaptive segmented delivery over HTTP. It takes HLS, HDS, and Smooth, blends them, adds some new features to produce an ISO-backed standard for delivering media," he said. "It's an ISO-based standard versus one that's tied to any particular company's implementation. It's really robust over a TCP and HTTP delivery, it supports various types of encapsulation, efficient trick modes, advertising insertion, so it's a very modern and current way to deliver video."

Once that was cleared up, Law explained how DASH-AVC/264 differs from MPEG-DASH.

"DASH-AVC/264 is a restriction, because DASH is a very broad standard. To make it useful in the real world, we need to tone it down. We need to say, 'Let's pick this low-hanging fruit and implement this in a certain way,'" Law explained.

To hear about the other ingredients and how companies are cooperating to create a browser-based MPEG-DASH player, watch the full presentation below.

Building an Open Source DASH-AVC/264 Player

dash.js ushers in a new era of industry cooperation in establishing a sophisticated and freely available browser-based player for MPEG-DASH. Leveraging the media source extensions being developed by the W3C, the player brings extensible, adaptive, multi-bitrate playback to a browser near you. In this presentation, learn about the architecture of the dash.js player, how it works with IE and Chrome, and how you can use it in your own projects. We also discuss the governance model of the project, its future road map and how you can contribute to this cutting-edge project.